Why are you protesting? When you walk in circles with signs, who do you think is listening? Who are you petitioning? The republicans do not care if first-graders are murdered in their classroom. Why do you think they care about your sign? Democratic politicians saw a genocide happening in Palestine and did what? They armed it and denounced anyone criticizing it, even the hundreds of Jews demanding an immediate peace, as 'antisemites.' Politicians could care less about your well-reasoned argument. There is a bipartisan consensus that women's reproductive rights, climate change, permanent war, wealth inequality, police brutality, border militarization, and anything else you want to add to our list are merely subjects to manufacture outrage and fundraise off of. We get lip-service, performative statements, and the ruling class gets a status quo of deregulation, subsidies, and bail-outs. The number of national politicians that actually care about any of this can be counted on one hand. They are simply within the margin of error in institutions that, by design, resist democracy and serve corporate power and the most wealthy. Hoping that a handful of these politicians will be able to meaningfully liberate us from this dystopia is foolish, but they are not to blame.
We are to blame. We fetishize so-called "nonviolent" resistance, mouth pacifism as our dogma, and repeat nonsensical phrases like "speaking truth to power." The powerful have much more clarity about the state of things–it benefits them and they run it–your e-petitions have no purchase.
Stop.
Ask yourselves, what are we doing? Why are we, the overwhelming majority, left so powerless, forced to choose between weak reality TV carnival barkers and feel-your-pain con artists? Are we supposed to riot in the streets. This very page has an image of a burning cop car, what if we have children and people to take care of? Are we supposed to simply stand up after reading another horrifying article about Palestinian children being incinerated for daring to wait in a food line for handouts and now we make molotov cocktails and charge the police with our homemade firebombs?
No, our protests mean nothing to the elites at this point and our riots mean little. It just becomes an excuse to ramp up policing. Another prop for the criminal "law-and-order" politicians to grandstand in feigned defense of patriotism and obedience. The police are just a wall of guard dogs to protect the ruling class, wolves to hunt us down, sacrificial lambs to face our anger. Dumb, proud, and dangerous, the ruling class loves to send the police out alongside their private armies, mercenaries, and thugs. Turning over a cop car doesn't scare the wealthy one bit. Afford more cop cars? They can afford politicians who then defund our libraries before sticking us with the tax bill for more cop cars. How dare we suggest defunding the police?
Why then? What then? Self-care? Yoga? Consumer activism? Boycotts? All meaningless to the ruling class: in fear, we turn inward and stare at our own navels or reduce ourselves to marketing demographics: Vegan Sally thrift-storing away sweatshops or macho Johnny with punisher logo cellphone cases riding a truck that belches black smoke. No, let's go back to our protest.
Let's stop and look around. See ourselves.
Let's ask: "what does it mean to demonstrate?" What are we demonstrating? Our numbers. How many of us are out there. Now imagine, we don't just all atomize away back to our homes, posting pictures of funny signs on social media, separately. Imagine that we trust those other people out there with us, to not just show up with a sign, but ready for something else. For just a moment, stop buying into the superhero mythology of saviors, neither the politician of hope and change or us alone with our funny sign. Instead, look at ourselves collectively. As a movement, then as an organization. Start with the logistics of meetings but move to discussing our theories. Share ideas for tactics and strategies and goals. Build organized power, with structure and accountability, autonomy and responsibility, not coercive or freeform, until we become a political force. Our opponents are not really the police or the politicians and certainly not people of different colors, religions, genders and identities. Our enemy is the rich. The capitalist class.
Our comrades are ourselves, working people, working together to build a world where we collectively have a say in our destiny. Where the people who make the soup can eat it. Where all of us can play a role in defining a what it is we are here to do, instead of applying for what is offered, begging for scraps, and competing against each other for a fraction of what we produce. What we are describing is a process to break apart the organized power of the capitalist class. This process has a name. That name is communism.

History Is A Weapon